iOS, Mac coders liking what they see in Apple’s Swift programming language

“Mac and iOS developers are taking hard looks at Swift, Apple’s new programming language introduced this month at WWDC in San Francisco,” David Morgenstern reports for ZDNet.

“David Owens, of Microsoft’s MS Office for Mac and iPad team, had previously posted on Medium that the introduction of Swift was a bad day for ObjC programmers. ‘This has me very sad for the future of iOS and OS X development. I do not see, at this point in time, any major changes happening to Swift. There are many fundamental items about Swift that I’m just not a fan of that I think break the spirit of what ObjC was about: pragmatism,'” Morgenstern reports. “However, in a recent post, Owens said he had changed his mind. He was blogging about creating a lightweight JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) library that provides the ‘expressiveness’ he had with ObjC, ‘while keeping true to the semantics of Swift.’ He was upbeat on Swift’s feature of Convertibles. ‘With just a little bit of work (and a lot of time fighting with current bugs in Xcode and Swift), Swift makes it possible to toe the line between type-safety and expressiveness. I can only imagine, that when we get proper documentation for all of this goodness, that most of my static typing concerns will simply dissapear. Feeling much more bullish on Swift today. =)”

“Michael Ash, author of The Complete Friday Q&A: Advanced topics in Mac OS X and iOS programming, posted an analysis of what he called ‘interesting features’ in Swift,” Morgenstern reports. “Ash says he’s looking forward to using Swift. ‘It has a lot of features that may seem foreign to someone coming from Objective-C, but I think they ultimately make a lot of sense and will be nice to use.'”

No, you don’t. All obj-c interface headers are available and translated to Swift. But, you can also mix code, i.e., write new stuff in Swift and still use old stuff you’ve written in obj-c. Or c, for that matter. Separate source files are neded though. Read the free reference. Watch the WWDC videos…